


Safe House Love

by Selenay



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Angst and Feels, Character Death Fix, Clint Feels, From Sex to Love, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-16
Updated: 2013-01-16
Packaged: 2017-11-25 18:45:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,863
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/641863
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Selenay/pseuds/Selenay
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Don't you ever want more? How long have we been doing this - three years?"</p>
<p>Three years, four months and five days, not that Clint was counting.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Safe House Love

**Author's Note:**

> This is an idea that has been stuck in my mind for a while. It's not my usual thing so Fahre held my hand when I wibbled about posting it and then did her usual excellent typo squashing job on the finished product.

Clint woke up slowly and for a while he couldn't work out what had disturbed him. He'd been deeply asleep and then there was something not quite right, pulling him up and out of the darkness. When he rolled onto his back and opened his eyes, he thought maybe he did know what had woken him after all. He just didn't like having to admit to it.

Phil was sitting in the bed next to him, his knees drawn up to his chest under the thin sheet. Moonlight streaming in through the open window gilded everything in silver. The naked skin of Phil's back looked pale and perfect and Clint had to clench a fist to stop himself reaching out to touch. Tiny goose bumps had risen in the cool breeze from the window and Clint could see that Phil had been awake for a while.

Phil waking up was what had disrupted his sleep. Phil waking up and releasing Clint from the spooned hold they both pretended they never did.

There were a lot of things they didn't do.

Clint frowned at the tension he could see in Phil's shoulders. He couldn't see the other man's face, his head was turned just enough to keep Clint from seeing more than the edge of his jaw, but he'd learned to read Phil's posture over the years. This tension was the unhappy kind, the type that came when Phil thought too much.

"What's wrong?" Clint asked and his voice came out husky from sleep instead of the calm, smooth tone he'd been trying for. "Phil?"

There was no movement and Clint almost thought Phil hadn't heard him. He shifted slightly, preparing to sit up. Maybe reach out and touch, find out how cold Phil's skin was even though they didn't do those kinds of touches.

Then Phil spoke and his voice was somehow distant and tired. "What are we doing?"

Clint hesitated before answering. "Well, I was sleeping. What were you doing?"

He was fairly sure that wasn't what Phil meant but he was equally sure he needed Phil to spell it out if they were going to have this conversation.

Phil made a quiet sound that could have been a snort but he didn't turn. "I was thinking."

"I hate when you do that," Clint said.

"Thinking? I've noticed."

"I can't sleep when you do it. Can whatever you're thinking about wait until morning? I need some sleep and we've got a long drive tomorrow."

"And then what?" Phil said and there was a note in his voice that Clint hadn't heard before. "We do what we always do, go back to being Agent Barton and Agent Coulson, pretend the last twenty-four hours didn't happen?"

"Pretend we haven't spent the last twenty-four hours fucking until we couldn't walk, you mean?" Clint asked and he couldn't quite stop the sneer in his voice.

There was a quiet sigh. "Do you have to be so crude all the time?"

"Just calling a spade a spade." Clint swallowed. "You're the one always trying to get me to use clear, precise descriptions."

And if he called it anything else, if he raised it above just fucking and into something more intimate, Clint didn't know what he'd do. He didn't know how to do that.

Phil's shoulders dropped slightly and his voice, if it was at all possible, sounded even more defeated. "Don't you ever want more? How long have we been doing this - three years?"

Three years, four months and five days, not that Clint was counting.

"Is a night or two in a safe house every couple of months, if we're lucky enough to get missions where it's just the two of us, enough for you?" Phil still didn't turn around but Clint got the feeling that he was being examined anyway. "Don't you ever want...when we get home, we could-"

"What?" Clint asked, cutting Phil off before he could say anything that could be too much. "When we go home, you want us to buy an apartment and two dogs together? Pretend we're some big thing we're not?"

There was a long silence and Clint felt something horrible clawing at his stomach, something that made him want to throw up and hide and lash out all at once.

Something that made him want to sit up and wrap his arms around Phil. Kiss every freckle on his back, so perfect in the moonlight, and bury his face in Phil's shoulder. Except they didn't do that, they didn't kiss beyond the hard, biting kisses they shared when the need was too much and they needed that contact. Kissing was something you did with a lover, not whatever they were. When they fucked, they didn't look each other in the eyes. It was all about heat and want and never, ever about intimacy.

Never about feelings.

Or at least, that was what Clint had told himself for the past three years, four months and five days.

"I'm not talking about pretending," Phil said eventually. "We could be that thing."

"We fuck, Coulson," Clint said coolly. "That's what we do, nothing more. We scratch an itch when we need to."

Clint could already see where this was going and he didn't want - couldn't want - it. He wanted to run away, to get some distance from Phil's...Coulson's feelings because they were too big and they were trying to overwhelm everything in this tiny, ugly bedroom. 

"What if I wanted more?" Coulson said and he seemed to hold his breath.

Clint swallowed. That nasty feeling in his stomach was rising, stealing the breath from his lungs and sending his heart racing so hard he was amazed Coulson couldn't hear it.

Fear. The thing sending ice through his veins and buzzing through his brain was fear because what Coulson was asking for was exactly what Clint had been terrified to think about since this entire thing started.

He took a shallow breath. And another. And said, "Then we have a problem."

Clint could see the moment when Coulson gave in. His spine grew impossibly rigid at the same time as his shoulders curled and drooped. He sat like that for a long moment, his body bathed in the cold silver light of a summer's night. Time seemed to slow and Clint almost reached out, almost said something stupid to try to take back his words, but he was frozen.

Eventually Coulson moved and Clint closed his eyes, afraid of what Coulson would see if he could look into Clint's eyes. Clint felt the mattress shift as Coulson stood and then he heard the quiet rustle as clothes were pulled on. He tracked Coulson's footsteps across the room and then the quiet snick of the door closing. The sound of cupboards opening, water running, and the soft chink of china signalled that Coulson was making coffee in the shitty little kitchen on the other side of the wall from Clint's bed.

***

Dawn came eventually and Clint hadn't slept at all, had just laid there listening to every quiet sound from the house and wishing he could go out there and apologise. He wasn't sure he'd even know how to apologise if he did go out.

They were back on the road an hour after dawn and neither of them spoke a word during the four hour drive to their extraction point. Everything was back to Barton and Coulson, nothing more, and certainly not the quiet warmth of the old Barton and Coulson. This was a new, cool professional relationship and Clint was almost relieved when their paths didn't cross at SHIELD for over a week.

He reasoned that they both needed time and pretended his relief wasn't because he was afraid he'd do something stupid like begging to try that conversation again so he could get it right this time.

Somehow there weren't any more safe houses alone together anymore. They always had Sitwell or Natasha, sometimes both, with them. Clint had never questioned how often they'd ended up in quiet little places on their own or why, three years and three months ago, they'd suddenly started having those quiet little overnight missions more often than they used to.

He didn't question the change now, either. He told himself it was a good thing and tried to forget that anything had ever been different.

***

Six months later

Clint's bed in his SHIELD quarters was uncomfortable, narrow and hard, and he asked himself yet again why he hadn't taken Stark up on his offer of accommodation at the tower. Even with the damage he knew the tower had taken, he was sure the beds would have been more comfortable.

Except he would be half a city from the SHIELD facility where he knew Coulson was lying. If he was honest, it was the thought of Coulson being so close that was keeping him from sleep tonight.

Phil Coulson had been 'alive' for less than twenty-four hours and he was already all Clint could think about. Again.

He'd thought the three days of believing Coulson was dead were bad enough. Who knew that Fury informing everyone he'd lied would be worse?

The fact that it happened on the day Loki was sent back to Asgard had somehow made the entire strange day feel even odder. Not better, just weird. Clint felt like all his emotions had been sealed in some kind of box for the last three days and somehow their meeting with Fury had made the numbness worse rather than better.

Apparently he'd just needed time because now he had feelings, they'd been released from their box and his head was filled with a whirl of confused thoughts and emotions.

He rolled over and punched his pillow but sleep still wouldn't come. Every time he started to drift away, he remembered that Coulson was only a few floors away and everything scattered again. Coulson was alive, he was within reach and maybe Clint could fix things now.

Maybe Clint was ready to fix things now.

The fear that had frozen him for all those months, kept him from saying anything that wasn't directly connected to their work, kept him from even thinking 'Phil' in the privacy of his head, was gone. It was a different fear now, the sick feeling that he might miss his chance again. This could be a second chance but what if it wasn't?

Fury had informed them all that Coulson was still asleep and the doctors hadn't been able to say when he might wake up. Clint told himself that sneaking down to medical and finding Coulson would be pointless. There was nothing he could do, no sense in even going there until Coulson was conscious.

Apparently it didn't matter whether it made sense. Clint still ended up quietly making his way down to the medical floor just before dawn, his eyes gritty from lack of sleep. There were a couple of nurses at a desk near the entrance and they looked at him with sympathetic eyes when he asked where Coulson's room was. He had a feeling that he looked like shit and as he'd only bothered to throw on a hoodie and ancient, mud-spattered jeans it wasn't as though his clothing was helping him to look less bedraggled. It was probably a minor miracle that they pointed him to Coulson's room instead of calling security.

He pulled the zip on his hoodie a little higher and loped down the hallway, trying to look confident rather than terrified.

Coulson was surrounded by monitors that all showed wavy lines and beeped quietly. There were more tubes coming out of him than Clint wanted to think about and his face was as pale as the sheets covering him. If it hadn't been for the slight rise and fall of his chest and the steady heartbeat shown on the monitors, Clint might have wondered if he was even alive.

This pale, exhausted man couldn't be the Coulson who had thrashed him around training rooms and wrung desperate, needy cries from Clint in safe houses. He was too small, too frail.

Clint swallowed and edged nearer, somehow disappointed when Coulson didn't move. There was a chair by his bed and after watching for a while, Clint gradually eased himself to sit. Growing more confident, Clint reached out to run a finger over the back of Coulson's hand where it lay on the sheet.

The skin was warm to touch, the first indication that this was a living man and not a corpse.

He rested his hand over Coulson's and then, deciding he might as well take his chance while it was there, twined their fingers together and raised the hand to his mouth so he could press a kiss on Coulson's knuckles.

"I'm sorry," he said, pressing another dry kiss on Coulson's fingers before letting their joined hands rest on the bed. "Shit, I'm so sorry. For everything."

He took a deep, shaky breath and sat silently for a while, trying to gather his thoughts together. No inspiration, no clever words came. Clint was knew he wouldn't have the guts to be honest if Coulson was awake, but maybe if he practised now while Coulson was asleep he'd hit on the right thing to say.

Maybe practising now would take away the fear so he'd be able to talk properly with Coulson looking at him. He'd never been able to say how he really felt when those beautiful blue eyes were focused on him with that intensity he'd both loved and hated all at once.

"Coulson." Clint stopped, took another shaky, careful breath. "Phil. I'm sorry, I'm a fucked up coward. I can't make things different, can't turn back time and undo what I did, but...that night in the safe house." He didn't need to say which one, there was only one. "I was afraid. You scared the shit out of me. Because I wanted what you were offering so much and I didn't know how to take it. Didn't know what to say. If I'd said something different, told you that I loved you so much it hurt, I would have..."

He paused, swallowed, because the words still weren't coming out right. "I lied. It was never just fucking, never something that crude. Not even the first time. I pretended it was because it was easier than admitting I wanted it all. Touching and kissing and getting that stupid apartment together and all the shit I said we couldn't do. Phil, I'm sorry. I didn't know how to say it."

He closed his eyes, let his head and body drop and bend forward until he was resting his cheek against their joined hands. This was it, the most honest he'd ever been with Coulson, and he was too chickenshit to do it to Coulson's face.

A finger twitched against his skin, Coulson's finger. Then there was a quiet, raspy voice.

"You're saying it now."

Clint's stomach did a horrible sickening roll. He could feel the fear trying to escape again, trying to make him freeze and lie his way out of this. Lifting his head felt like the hardest thing he'd ever done and Clint couldn't quite make his eyes meet Coulson's. Instead he focused his gaze somewhere around collarbone level, staring intently at the weave of the white hospital shirt Coulson wore and the hint of bandaging that just peeked above the low neckline.

"How long have you been awake?" he asked.

"Now specifically or in general?" Coulson's voice was thin and low. "I woke up last night, I think. Or maybe it's still today. It's hard to keep track, I keep falling asleep."

"Oh." Clint hadn't released Coulson's hand and he didn't seem inclined to pull free, which had to be a positive sign.

"I woke up this time when you sat down," Coulson continued.

"Ah." Clint couldn't suppress a wince. "So you heard everything."

"I did."

"Oh."

"Did you mean it?"

Clint shrugged, raising his eyes to around chin level but still unable to meet Coulson's gaze.

"I'm going to assume that's a yes," Coulson said. "Would I be right?"

It would be easy to lie again, smile and walk away and pretend but Clint couldn't do it. He nodded jerkily and waited.

"Well, that's somewhere we can start." Coulson's voice, still weak, now had some warmth to it. The warmth seemed to settle somewhere in Clint's chest, loosening the grip of the icy fear. "Do you want to know when I realised our arrangement wasn't enough anymore?"

'Arrangement' was such a polite way to term their safe house fuck buddies deal and Clint almost smiled at it. Instead he shrugged and hoped Coulson wouldn't stop talking.

"When we were in that farmhouse just outside Oslo," Coulson said. "You cooked breakfast and I realised that I wanted to do that when we got home."

"Cook breakfast?" Clint asked before he could stop himself.

"Eat the breakfast you'd cooked me. Hold you in my arms as we fell asleep." Coulson hesitated for a moment. "Make love on lazy Saturday afternoons and look into your eyes when you came."

Clint swallowed hard and his voice, when he spoke, sounded thick and wrong in his ears. "Oslo. That was two years ago."

"It took me a while to get the courage up to say anything," Coulson said and there was a sound that might have been a chuckle. "You're not the only coward."

"I wasn't..." Clint trailed off, tried to find the right words. "I wanted more. I think I always wanted more, but you know how I fuck up relationship so I pretended that what we had was all I wanted. Was enough. Some nights I wanted to touch you so much and I couldn't."

"I did it all wrong as well," Coulson said. "That night...I've replayed it more times than I can count and I shouldn't have just left the way I did."

Clint had to look up at that, had to look into Coulson's...Phil's eyes and the regret he saw there echoed his so much it made his heart hurt.

"You know what I was thinking that night?" Clint asked. "All that time we were lying there, you looked so beautiful in the moonlight, and all I wanted to do was kiss the freckles on your back. Except we didn't do that kind of thing and I couldn't move because I was too scared of what I was feeling. You scare the shit out of me."

Phil smiled ruefully, the skin crinkling at the corners of his eyes. "You've mentioned that."

"Because it's true." Clint shrugged. "Except I'm more scared right now of not having you than I am of what having you could mean. If that makes any sense."

"I understood you."

"I think you're the only person in this room who does." Clint kept his eyes locked with Phil's, trying to read something in there beyond the old regrets and new exhaustion. "Is this...do you still want more? Do you still want all those things?"

"Do you?"

The question hung in the air and Clint would have protested that it was unfair to put it all on him, except he was the one who had done all the running away over the years. He'd started their arrangement, yes, but it had all been on his terms and his terms had been entirely focused on keeping it from being any more than an 'arrangement'.

He'd kept them fucking in safe houses and only safe houses so there would never be anything more.

Clint could still feel that urge to flee but it was getting drowned out by everything else. Visions of the life Phil had described and a feeling so deep and painful and wonderful he could hardly breathe.

"I want it," Clint said, his voice cracking. "I want all of it. I'm scared shitless and I've got no idea how to do it, but I want it."

Something shifted in Phil's expression. His eyes softened and there was relief mixed with something much stronger. Clint chose to pretend that the painful pricking he could feel in his own eyes was a reaction to the dry air in the room.

"Then that's a good place to start," Phil said and his voice cracked as well. "A very good place."

The tight knot in Clint's throat disappeared and he found that he was smiling, a rush of happiness spreading through him that was almost enough to make him giddy. His grin was answered by the smile on Phil's face and Clint had to duck his head for a moment because it was all too much. He lifted Phil's hand and kissed his fingers, smiling against the skin when he heard Phil's sharply indrawn breath.

Phil somehow managed to turn his hand and pull free so he could cup Clint's jaw. Clint leaned into the touch and closed his eyes for a moment as Phil's thumb traced over his lips. He knew every inch of Phil's body, had pulled him close and shamelessly begged for more when Phil thrust into him, and yet that chaste touch felt more intimate than anything they ever done together.

He opened his eyes and was caught in Phil's gaze again.

"Can I kiss you?" he asked, feeling strangely shy.

Phil nodded wordlessly and Clint leaned forward to touch their lips together. There was a cannula in Phil's nose and their lips were too dry but Clint's breath caught in his throat because this was something new. This wasn't the hard, sometimes angry kisses they'd shared in their safe houses with the lights off.

It was gentle, more of a caress than a kiss, and Clint couldn't resist a second taste when he felt Phil's breath puff out against his cheek.

The soft beeping from the monitors sped up a little and Clint reluctantly pulled away.

"Guess we have to go slowly while you heal up," he said quietly.

"I guess so," Phil agreed.

There was a hint of colour in Phil's face now, but he looked drawn and exhausted. Clint frowned and placed a hand over the thick bandages above Phil's heart.

"You should rest," he said.

"I should."

There was a hint of something uncertain in Phil's voice and after a moment Clint asked, "Mind if I stay? It's not creepy, is it?"

"You watching me sleep?" Phil shook his head, his eyes already starting to droop. "I've heard worse."

"Not so much watching," Clint said because now he could feel the exhaustion from his restless night and all the other long, sleepless nights before it catching up. "Think I'll be sleeping as well."

The chair wasn't comfortable but he managed to find a way to curl up with his head on Phil's hip, their hands clasped together, and when a nurse came to check on Phil later she smiled gently and draped a blanket over Clint's shoulders.

As Clint drifted into sleep he smiled slightly because this, tangled fingers and chaste kisses, had always been a thing they didn't do and now they did.


End file.
